There was a time in college football when it was not uncommon to see a coach attend a game involving a future opponent, taking notes and gathering information.
“When I worked for Jimmy Johnson at Oklahoma State, when they had a game on Saturday, I was at the next opponent’s house. I was watching the next game,” recalled Houston Nutt, the former Arkansas and Mississippi coach who worked under Johnson with the Cowboys in the early 1980s.
The NCAA banned advanced in-person testing in 1994, in part because not all schools could afford it. Michigan is under investigation by the NCAA for a signal-stealing scheme that allegedly involved people being secretly sent to record opponents’ games.
No. 2 Michigan suspended a low level football staff member who is in the center of attention The NCAA Investigation. The Big Ten has notified all of Michigan’s upcoming opponents. Undaunted, the Wolverines continued their run Saturday night, beating rival Michigan State 49-0.
NCAA rules don’t directly prohibit signal stealing. There are rules against using electronic equipment to record an opponent’s signals, but the main problem with Michigan is NCAA Rule 11.6.1: “In-person and off-campus scouting of prospective opponents (during the same season) is prohibited.”
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Wolverines Coach Jim Harbaughwho served a three-game suspension imposed by the school earlier this season for a separate, still-active NCAA recruiting-related violations case, has denied any knowledge of or involvement in impermissible advanced scouting.
“There’s a goal, yes. Everybody’s been pointing that out since the beginning of the season, but our guys are very focused,” Harbaugh said after Saturday night’s game.
As with many NCAA rules, the association tries to narrow the advantages one school might have over another based on budget size. Programs such as Michigan, Ohio State, Texas and Alabama have annual athletic budgets that exceed $200 million, nearly double those of some programs even in their own Power Five conferences.
Step outside the Power Five and even the biggest-spending college football schools have budgets closer to $50 million than $100 million.
David Ridpath, an Ohio University professor and former compliance director at Colorado State and Marshall, said he remembers former Tennessee coach Phillip Fulmer, when he was an assistant, attending a CSU game in Fort Collins to scout the Rams in the late 1980s during a bye week for the Volunteers.
A few years later, in response to complaints from coaches and administrators, the NCAA decided to end it.
“It was really a financial issue because there were all these coaches leaving, and honestly, even the coaches didn’t want to do it anymore. Also, technology was changing at that time,” Ridpath said.
Each game is recorded for self-monitoring purposes by the home team, but film exchanges between opposing teams have long since become obsolete. Access to digital recordings of games is readily available through online exchange programs.
The way the game is played today also places more emphasis on signs and, therefore, sign stealing.
For most of Nutt’s career, which began as a graduate assistant at Oklahoma State in 1981, teams mostly huddled methodically between snaps, with plays sent through player substitution.
In the 2000s, offenses began to abandon the huddle for a faster approach. It became increasingly necessary to signal offensive and defensive actions from the sidelines. And with that, teams began trying to decipher each other’s signals.
Many teams use hand signals and have multiple signalmen on the sideline to try to confuse opponents. Some teams use elaborate game maps — Beyoncé, Kermit the Frog, Scott Van Pelt and dozens of other images have been used over the years.
Nowadays, you often see on the sidelines a large sheet, tarp or billboard used to keep the signs from getting on the marker film.
However, it is possible that someone in a stadium is monitoring or recording signals that can then be combined with tracking film to be decoded.
In the NFL, where advanced scouting is allowed, the New England Patriots were caught recording opponents’ signals during a 2007 game and were punished with fines and the loss of a draft pick.
Hand signals have largely disappeared from the NFL over the past decade, replaced by radio technology in headsets that allow coaches to verbally communicate with certain players on the field.
Communication between players and coaches is a recurring issue in college football, where rules must apply to hundreds of schools with vastly different resources. As with in-person scouting, concerns about creating a competitive advantage based on resources and a lack of consistency in implementation have been a hurdle.
However, this year during bowl season, the NCAA will allow teams to use coach-player communication technology during postseason games if both parties agree.
Steve Shaw, the NCAA’s national coordinator of football officials and rules editor, said that instead of trying to standardize the technology and force every team to use the same setup, teams will be allowed to use whatever they want.
Shaw said he hopes this will be a step toward coach-player technology becoming the norm in college football.
“If we can get to a world without signals,” Shaw said, “it will be one less thing to think about.”
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